Leadership & EQ in startups today — Job Shadowing at Mood (with Going Viral)
Have you ever wanted to find music festivals in your city on the spot, in a quick and accessible way?
This is what the Greek startup Mood, developing the app of the same name, is exactly focused on creating for the past 6 years — and that where our team, Going Viral, carried out our final team project as part of the Leadership & EQ course of ADandPRLab, focused specifically on “job shadowing”.
In short, this means to become the “shadow” of a leader in their workplace, and observe the way the company works and their day-to-day responsibilities, creating an interactive and realistic learning experience not just for us as college students, but as potential future leaders and employees.
What is Mood?
In short, Mood (Music Of Our Desire) is an app that shows you in real time what music is playing in various venues in Athens (and not only). The app allows free exploration and navigation of the city’s nightlife, through Mood’s intuitive and user-friendly interface — providing real-time music information for each venue.
As a one of a kind venture into the world of the music event industry, our team was interested in learning more about being responsible for a startup like this — and what leadership & EQ looks like in it.
The day of the “shadowing”
Members of our team had the chance to visit the Mood offices in central Athens, and to meet Dimitrios Komninos, co-founder and CEO of Mood, to take a look into an average working day and have an interview with the leader himself.
Getting into the office, we were greeted with a welcoming and friendly environment where the employees invited us, showing their great connection and understanding from working with each other. Dimitris was constantly available to help with any issue, and even at a point where someone made a mistake, he was quick to approach this calmly and with humor.
Talking individually with Dimitris later, we learned many things about the world of startups in Greece, and how leadership & EQ play a great role in smaller companies like Mood. Having great ambitions for Mood, he highlighted sustainability, quick growth and the type of market as key factors for a startup’s success, but focused on the importance of a stable team with strong collaboration.
“90% is the team — 10% is the market.”
And that is obvious by his own role in the company — Dimitris stressed that his skill set lies less in his hard skills, and more in being a “jack of all trades” and able to see the bigger picture, by communicating and coordinating the team of Mood. As such, the team, including the co-owners of the company, both play an active role in discussions on various opinions and changes to analyze, but also have their own specialties — but only the leader is called upon to make the final decision.
Additionally, Dimitris, as we observed earlier, puts great emphasis in not treating any mistake as a failure, but as a learning opportunity for the team (“What did we learn from this?”, he says.). Arguments in times of crises or any mistakes is a rare occurrence, and great effort is made instead to acknowledge and address clearly any mistakes or other problems within the team — and encourage improvement.
This culture of direct communication is one that Mood’s leadership is probably characterized by the most — Dimitris also mentioned to us how important it is for a leader to learn constantly and be flexible with the team, to make them “get out of themselves” and express their opinions and emotions clearly, which later in times of crises proves vital.
Of course, for the startup to be successful, everyone has to be a team player. Dimitris tells us that while he needs to be able to adapt to each team member’s ambitions and aspirations, it’s necessary for the team to have “a common vision — common goals — cohesion in the lives between the team — but different and important roles that really complement each other and are hard to be replaced.” That’s why Mood has co-founders that support and provide specialized knowledge, but only one leader.
“It’s difficult on your own, you need a co-founder who can support you and fill in what the leader doesn’t know.”
With that, we got a first taste of what it means to be in a working environment of a unique Greek startup, that relies heavily on common goals and a strong and adaptable team above all, the difficulties in that cooperation, but also took a look into the ability of a leader to direct his colleagues towards improvement with compassion and motivation.
It was truly an interesting experience and we thank Dimitris Komninos and the entire team of Mood for this opportunity and their hospitality, and Dimitra Iordanoglou, coordinator of the “Leadership and EQ Lab”, without whom we would not have that opportunity to experience “job shadowing” and recognise the role of leadership & EQ in any team (company or not), in the first place.
Thank you to our team members, Katerina, Stella & Kyriaki for representing our team for the visit!
